"Seen a lot of you lately," Lauer began after introducing her as his guest, referring to a wardrobe malfunction she had suffered days earlier. Photographers shot images up her skirt as she exited a car, revealing that she was not wearing underwear. The photos were widely publicised in the following days.

"Sorry about that," Hathaway said through a nervous laugh as she looked away. "I’d be happy to stay home, but, uh, the film."

Eager to get one specific question "out of the way", Lauer continued: "You had a little wardrobe malfunction the other night. What’s the lesson learned from something like that? Other than that you keep smiling, which you always do?"

"Um, I think— It kinda made me sad on two accounts. One was that I was very sad that we live in an age when someone takes a picture of another person in a vulnerable moment and, rather than delete it, and do the decent thing, sells it."

"And I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants, which brings us back to Les Mis, because that’s what my character is—she is someone who is forced to sell sex to benefit her child, because she has nothing and there’s no social safety net. Yeah, so, um, so let’s get back to Les Mis," she concluded.

Unexpectedly, as if impressed by Hathaway's rebound, Lauer replied: "One of the most creative turns of a question I’ve ever heard."

In the same interview, Lauer asked her about her weight loss for the film. Hathaway underwent a dramatic physical transformation to play the sickly Fantine, a working-class prostitute.

Anne Hathaway in Les Miserables. Image: Universal Pictures

She had avoided questions about her physical appearance in the film so as not to glamourise Fantine's devastation.

Hathaway went on to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the role in 2013.

It was announced Wednesday that Lauer, a 20-year veteran of NBC News, was fired from the organisation after a current NBC employee accused him of inappropriate sexual conduct that began on a trip at the Sochi Olympics in 2014 and continued "for several months".

Three more women have come forward with allegations in a bombshell report published by Variety.

According to the report, Lauer once gave a colleague a sex toy as a present. It included an explicit note about how he wanted to use it on her, which left her mortified.

On another day, he summoned a different female employee to his office, and then dropped his pants, showing her his penis. After the employee declined to do anything, visibly shaken, he reprimanded her for not engaging in a sexual act.

He would sometimes quiz female producers about who they'd slept with, offering to trade names. And he loved to engage in a crass quiz game with men and women in the office: "f--, marry, or kill," in which he would identify the female co-hosts that he'd most like to sleep with.